“Quietly moving . . . connected by a kind of dream logic . . . deeply felt . . . There is joy and tenderness in . . . Fung’s elegant storytelling.”—The New York Times Book Review
How do you grieve, if your family doesn’t talk about feelings?
This is the question the unnamed protagonist of GhostForest considers after her father dies. One of the many Hong Kong “astronaut” fathers, he stays there to work, while the rest of the family immigrated to Canada before the 1997 Handover, when the British returned sovereignty over Hong Kong to China.
As she revisits memories of her father through the years, she struggles with unresolved questions and misunderstandings. Turning to her mother and grandmother for answers, she discovers her own life refracted brightly in theirs.
Buoyant and heartbreaking, Ghost Forest is a slim novel that envelops the reader in joy and sorrow. Fung writes with a poetic and haunting voice, layering detail and abstraction, weaving memory and oral history to paint a moving portrait of a Chinese-Canadian astronaut family.
“Ghost Forest is the tender/funny book we can all appreciate after a hellish year.”—Literary Hub
Author
Pik-Shuen Fung
PIK-SHUEN FUNG is an award-winning author and artist. Her debut novel Ghost Forest won the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been translated in Italy, Turkey, Quebec, and Japan. She has received the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Margins Fellowship, the Kundiman Fiction Fellowship, and the Kundiman Mentorship Lab Fellowship, as well as residencies at Millay Arts and Storyknife. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, Literary Hub, Poets & Writers, Reactor, The Margins and The Italian Review, and her art has been exhibited at the Material Art Fair in Mexico City, the Katonah Museum, the Newark Museum, the Secret Theatre, and the Frank Institute at CR10. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver, Canada, she has a BA from Brown University and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, and worked for a few years in London in between. She now lives in Brooklyn.
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